Interoception & Decision Making

Decision making is a critical aspect of everyday life, ranging from deciding what to eat for breakfast to deciding which job to accept. One way that psychologists measure decision making is through intertemporal choice tasks. For example, would you choose a smaller reward now, or a larger reward after a specified amount of time. The greater the expanse of time, the more likely you are to choose the smaller reward now. The difference between the quantity of reward now verses later divided by the amount of time between the two options is considered your "discounting rate", where higher numbers suggest more impulsivity and lower numbers suggest more patience.

Here, I was interested in how body sensations play a role in this impulsivity. We found that those who tended to be more aware of their body in general, also tended to be more impulsive on the temporal discounting task.

Through these set of projects, I gained experience with ecological momentary assessment protocols (both programming and implementation), data cleaning, collecting and cleaning physiological measures such as heartrate and respiration rate, and working with online participant platforms (e.g. Prolific). I also had the opportunity on one of the projects to be the team lead, where I learned how to manage a team of 12 undergraduates/graduate students with both managing complex scheduling and conflict resolution. Through all three studies involving intertemporal choice, I collaborated extensively with professors at the University of Minnesota, other graduate students within the lab, as well as a team of researchers at Northeastern University. In terms of analyses, I worked extensively with correlations and multi-level linear regression models.